State machines, often also referred to as finite state machines (FSM), are widely used in many different areas, including development of integrated circuits, software engineering and character and voice recognition. State machines can be used to detect a particular pattern in a data stream, often referred to as parsing. Emerging trends in information technology demand ever higher processing rates.
It is an object of the invention to provide improved solutions for running state machines. It is a further object of the invention to provide solutions with increased processing rates.